In July, four members of the editorial board of the Heath Anthology
of American Literature-Paul Lauter, Amy Ling, Hortense Spillers, and
Andrew Wiget-constituted the United States delegation to a conference on
American minority literatures at the Gorky Institute for World Literatures
in Moscow. They exchanged papers with a group of Soviet scholars from the
Gorky Institute, Moscow State University, and the University of Tbilisi
and engaged in a series of lively debates over the course of three crowded
days. The Gorky Institute is a research organization of some 300 scholars
in a variety of fields, about ten of whom constitute the American literature
group. The Heath Anthology itself constituted one source of discussion.

As many American scholars have come to know, a significant group of
our Soviet counterparts are quite familiar with work principally by African-American
and American Indian writers-less so with texts by Hispanic- and Asian-American
authors. They have translated a large number of works into Russian (as
well as into some of the other languages of the Soviet Union, like Georgian),
published books and pamphlets on a broad range of American minority writers,
and are often quite up on new books from the United States. The Gorky Institute
participants are, in fact, deeply involved in producing a long-delayed
multi-volume history of American literature. Furthermore, certain works
"rediscovered" in the last decade or two in the United States,
like Rebecca Harding Davis' "Life in the Iron-Mills" or Claude
McKay's Home to Harlem, have long been familiar to Soviet scholars.

Still, as the sometimes heated discussions showed, American and Soviet
critics seem headed in quite differing directions. Soviet scholars, perhaps
reacting to the earlier official lines, seemed less interested in questions
of politics or historicism-in issues of the "cultural work" texts
perform-and more devoted to formal, sometimes rather New Critical, analyses.
Some of the debate centered around what U. S. participants saw as rather
idealist formulations posed by Soviet scholars; certainly materialism,
dialectical or otherwise, did not occupy center stage in their literary
world. The Soviet participants, women and men alike, also found it difficult
to see the importance of recent feminist approaches to the study of culture;
perhaps the most heated arguments of all concerned questions of gender,
often underlined by the Americans and marginalized, at best, by the Soviets.
(It ought to be said, however, that elsewhere in Soviet academic life,
"women's issues" and questions of gender are taken with great
seriousness and studied intensively. But there seems to have been relatively
little interaction between those sectors and most of the critics doing
literary study.) Many of the Soviet scholars were also skeptical about
the questions of the canon that have become so conflicted in the United
States. One participant insisted that, after all, "we know what our
classics are"-Turgenev, Dostoievski, Tolstoi-and the point is to study
them-and, it often sounded, them alone.

While most of the discussions focussed on American literatures and cultures,
the question of Soviet "minority" cultures did arise. As is better
known now (post-coup) in the United States, the American and Soviet situations
with regard to minority and ethnic cultures are vastly different-to put
it mildly. Certainly experience in the United States provides little useful
guidance in a situation where ethnic groups are separated not only by thousand-year
histories and formidable geographical boundaries but by everything from
religions and eating habits to languages and alphabets. The group was fortunate
enough to meet and talk with the directors of two ethnic publishing houses,
one of which is planning to print a Russian-language version of the conference
papers as well as a series of translations of American ethnic works.

While the arguments were intense and some of the differences profound,
the Soviet scholars were wonderfully generous and informative hosts. Despite
the most daunting financial constraints, intense work demands, and the
social upheavals clear even weeks before the failed coup, they provided
an amazing series of opportunities for American participants to learn about
the cultures, arts, and history of their country. Some of us, for example,
had the good fortune to see an enormous show of Soviet art from the 1920s
and 1930s. It contained hundreds of works, some reflecting the officially-approved
styles, but much else a variety that would be surprising even to the well-informed.
Variety, however, was not confined to museums: street art in many forms
has a vivid life at least in Moscow and Leningrad-as, indeed, does street
democracy.

A number of the Soviet literary scholars from the Gorky Institute and
elsewhere have spoken or taught-indeed, are now teaching-in U. S. institutions.
These kinds of exchanges are, of course, enormously interesting and helpful
for both sides and provide significant opportunities to foster the study
of all the literatures and cultures of the United States here and throughout
the Soviet Union.